Elastos Weekly Updates – Anniversary Edition

“It’s kind of fun to do the impossible.”

-Walt Disney

The Elastos One Year Anniversary Event was a fantastic celebration for our community with twenty-one different countries represented at our three day event in Chiang Mai, Thailand. The highlights of Saturday’s conference included full reports on the progress of our first year and the announcement of our Alpha release, Cyber Republic launch, and the commencement of merge mining with Bitcoin via Bitmain, more than three months ahead of schedule.

Elastos had a big anniversary. Let’s recap.

Saturday morning’s event started off with a video highlighting some of our memorable moments from year one. The 4 minute video that describes Elastos and its community as building “the world wide smart web,” can be found here:

Rong Chen gave a rousing speech about the history of Elastos and the lead up to our official launch in August 2017. He explained that after 17 years of working towards launching a network operating system for the world, Foxconn removed its investment into his project, and in the midst of that door closing, Feng Han appeared with a proposition, opening another door, the door to Elastos and with it the addition of blockchain to his decades long journey.

Rong spoke of his determination to lead Elastos to success and demanded that the team hit their deadlines, releasing the genesis block on time and creating a culture of hitting all future deadlines.

Merged mining was deployed with Bitmain mining pools starting with btc.com. This means that miners who join the mining pools for Bitcoin mining can also earn ELA as a reward because the miners can submit proof of work to both the Bitcoin and Elastos Blockchain simultaneously, with the same energy and hashpower. This merged mining can also be passed on from Bitcoin to the Elastos main chain to any number of Elastos sidechains to secure thousands of applications that might be connected to these sidechains. Elastos browser had its Alpha launch which integrates the Elastos Runtime and Elastos Carrier in it where http/https calls are disabled. This means that the applications developed for this browser are run inside the Elastos runtime environment while the communication is taken over by a decentralized peer to peer network called Elastos Carrier, while the IDs are authenticated using Blockchain. Each device, each url, each user, which is to say, everything gets an ID on the Elastos ecosystem. The browser supports an embedded wallet that contains support to hold the mainchain currency, ELA and the ID sidechain token. In the future, this same wallet can be extended to hold any number of Elastos sidechain native tokens. As part of the Elastos Smartweb Alpha, a number of demo apps were also released including wallet, instant messenger, blockchain based games and a CAR demo. In the future, the AuxPoW+DPoS consensus protocol will be implemented where the miners mine blocks via merged mining with BTC while DPoS nodes are used to sign blocks to create a finality on the blocks, thereby making it very difficult for a hard fork to happen. Some of the sidechains are also in active development, such as Ethereum smart contracts sidechain, NEO smart contracts sidechain, token sidechain and digital assets sidechain. The Elastos Smartweb Beta is scheduled to be released by the end of the year.

The Elastos Infographic Contest produced many fantastic visuals that express our technology and infrastructure in easy to understand formats. Thank you to everyone who submitted for continuing to help us prove that a community driven approach can produce top quality content. Winners and their submissions can be found here: https://elanews.net/2018/08/30/elastos-infographic-contest-winners/

Elastos Community Leader, Kevin Zhang, shared his experiences over the past 2 months, visiting 14 countries and attending 19 meetups organized by the Elastos community. According to Kevin, the most important factor to make Elastos successful is the amount of DApps running on top of Elastos. DApp developers will play a very important role in the ecosystem and his aim is to motivate them and encourage them to build on Elastos through Cyber Republic.

Elastos PR Director, Hao Cheng, shared the PR dynamics of the year highlighting major events attended and awards received by Elastos.

Elastos Chief Secretary, Hongjie Hu, disclosed the Annual Expenditure of the Elastos Foundation and announced the burning of 453,415 ELA

Elastos Co-Founder, Feng Han, spoke about evaluating a cryptocurrency investment by focusing on four major points:

Vision

Team Leaders

Key problems they are solving

Global Community

Feng also announced the beginning of merged mining with Bitcoin and his plans to set up a fund with Jihan Wu for the development of the Elastos Ecosystem.

While Jihan Wu was not in attendance at the anniversary, he had this to say about the announcement of merged mining.

“At Bitmain, we strive to be at the forefront of recognizing new, innovative technologies in the blockchain space as well as the cutting edge teams leading the way to mainstream adoption — Elastos is one of those projects. There are very few projects we have opened our community up to, and there are currently only three merged mining with Bitmain. I have an immense amount of faith in the potential impact of Elastos, which is not limited to the blockchain space alone. We look forward to continuing to be a part of the community promoting the Elastos ecosystem.”

Rong Chen said of the announcement,

“ELA is one of the first coins to be merged mined with Bitmain. This partnership serves as an affirmation of the strength of the Elastos community and technology. The accomplishments in our first year alone are indicative of Elastos’ potential to make waves far beyond the blockchain space — we are on track to change the whole internet industry, its users, digital ecosystem and to create an industrial strength IOT network. This is the internet of the future, where people will own their data, and connect directly and securely.”

A new website for cyberrepublic.org and a totally new brand were born at the anniversary. Cyber Republic is an online country where entrepreneurs and developers can join together to help build the Elastos vision and be rewarded in the native currency of ELA. This website is in its alpha version and will continue to be updated as the project grows.

Initially conceived of as a place for developers and community members to find tasks to complete and be rewarded in ELA, the new Cyber Republic is a much grander and more ambitious project. To start, the Elastos Foundation ceremoniously gave 16.5 million ELA to Cyber Republic during the Anniversary Event.

This total, nearly half the total coin supply, is more than a symbolic gesture. Cyber Republic will have full autonomy over these coins and will be able to build their own government and plans for the use of the coins. For the near future, an Interim Cyber Republic Council made up of Fay Li, Chief Marketing Officer, Kevin Zhang, Head of Development, and Yipeng Su, Chief Architect, will manage the funds and major hiring decisions for the online country. However, these are temporary posts that will evolve as the Cyber Republic Constitution is completed and a government mechanism is put in place to self-run the ecosystem with global leadership and democratically elected representatives. We hope to have our voting mechanism in place by June 2019, at which point the public will be able to start voting for the Cyber Republic Council Members and Secretaries.

Fay Li, Chief Marketing Officer of Elastos, said of Cyber Republic,

“We are starting an online country that will enable entrepreneurs and developers to democratically build the new internet, and we are giving almost half of our coins to fund it. Our first initiative for Cyber Republic is to fund the construction of 100 decentralized applications on Elastos. We are the first blockchain project to do this.”

The main initiatives announced were two projects, CR100 and Empower35.

CR100

CR100 is the flagship project of Cyber Republic, inviting teams of entrepreneurs to apply for funding to design and build the next great Elastos Ecosystem DApp. The 100 projects listed are templates that exemplify the diversity and abilities of the Elastos infrastructure.

Each project represents a different use case for a decentralized application that can disrupt the current landscape of applications. Teams are asked to use these ideas as inspirations for either their own future or existing whitepapers and to submit detailed proposals that outline their plan.

The Cyber Republic Council will select projects that are particularly promising and provide funding of 100k USD in ELA to a chosen team for 5% equity or tokens as an angel investor. Funding will be provided as milestones are hit based on the whitepaper submitted. While CR100 is designed to create variety, funding may be provided to more than one DApp in each category. Teams are also allowed to submit their own unique proposal.

This project is designed to really showcase what Elastos can do. Allowing the public to come in and submit their ideas and be supported by Cyber Republic is a pioneering project in the blockchain space that puts the philosophy of the Republic on display with real and tangible action.

The doors are open, now come and build with us.

Empower35

Empower35 is a project to select the future leaders, managers, and congresspeople of Cyber Republic. This group of experts in partnership development, marketing, business development, DApp analysis, DApp consulting, security, translation, writing, product management, media production, law, public speaking, and investment will be the first representatives that will shape and enable all future growth of the autonomous and decentralized democratic republic. In the coming weeks, CR will begin accepting applications for each role and positions will be selected by the Cyber Republic Council.

Each position comes with an annual compensation of 100k USD paid in ELA.

Responsibilities for each applicant include:

Building and leading their own teams of members with the same expertise.

Incubating the CR100 projects based on their experience.

Applying for a budget based on their proposal to manage and hire their own teams in each respective area.

Finding the next group of leaders as our Republic continues to expand and work towards our goal of full democratic decentralization.

Cyber Republic is looking for top candidates to lay the groundwork for all future growth and enable this very modern and exciting project to flourish. This is a bold and unique idea and Elastos is thrilled to support global cooperation and decentralization as we all watch the new internet be built.

Rong Chen gave an in depth talk on “A Computer Science Perspective of Elastos”

Ecosystem Partners

Ecosystem Partner: ioeX | Speech by Aryan Huang

Ecosystem Partner: Viewchain | Speech by Frank Wang

Ecosystem Partner: Bit.Game | Speech by Kelvin Wong

Ecosystem Partner: Hashworld | Speech by Yifan Song & Zijie Yuan

Ecosystem Partner: WeFilmChain | Speech by Garnet Campbell

Anniversary recap and AMA webinars were hosted by Elastos for the global community.